The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

Jungian terms, it is a war between the
‘persona’ (what we would like to be, and how we wish to be seen by the world),
and the ‘shadow’ (the unconscious mind, which is composed of repressed ideas,
instincts, impulses, weaknesses, longings, perversions, and embarrassing fears).
It is interesting to note that the word persona itself is derived from a Latin word
that literally means ‘mask’, implying that the personality we project is nothing
but a collection of masks.
We are often aghast at our own actions and appalled at what we see in
the world. In human life, the foundation for anything to happen for the better
is to recognize that the fountainhead of our troubles and the source of our wellbeing
are both within us. We must also recognize that our lives are fashioned
by our choices, and our choices are now to a large extent aiding the wrong side
in the war within. The fact that the wrong side is winning in this war accounts
for why we are so easily succumbing to polarization, tribalism, xenophobia, and
sectarian thinking, and why we are unable to strike a common narrative to tackle
complex problems like climate breakdown. And that has extracted a terrible toll
on us: loss of self-esteem, to what we might call ‘climate fatigue’. It explains
the apathy of the good and ardor of the evil, bringing to mind what WB Yeats
wrote a century ago: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of
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passionate intensity” (The Second Coming, 1919). Whether we are able to manage
our mental and emotional fragility at a time of transformative turbulence, and
whether enough of us can see ourselves as part of a larger ‘Us’ instead of an
atomized ‘I’, hinges on what happens collectively in this war. In fact, much of
our greed and sorrow comes from the nagging feeling of not having enough of
anything we want—money, success, work, leisure, recognition, reward, etc. The
more we have, the more it is ‘not good enough’. For instance, more money, as
Benjamin Franklin once said, instead of filling a vacuum, makes one. We cannot
overcome that feeling so long as the mind dominates our consciousness, and the
way to overcome that is to win the war within.
We must also remember that an individual is just as responsible for not
refusing something as for choosing it. To induce such a perspective, we need a
radical change in the way we lead our lives, particularly the way we make choices
germane to the three things that dominate our mind and mood: morality, money,
and mortality. We have to redirect our attention, intelligence, and energy to
ensure that the forces of goodness prevail over the forces of evil, bearing in mind
that evil too has ‘evolved’, and changed its colors. It is indistinguishable from our
‘culture’, and implicit in the infrastructure of everyday life. As Andrew Kimbrell
tells us, “Evil no longer requires evil people to purvey it as it did in the past”.19
That is because evil, what Kimbrell calls ‘cold evil’, has transcended the individual
and infiltrated all human institutions. And it also no longer requires ‘proximity’
or physical presence; horrific evil can be launched thousands of miles from the
‘target’. We must also bear in mind that the word ‘evil’ is more than the sound
of a malevolent incantation, much more than massacres and murders, and, in
the broader setting, violence itself is much more than overt physical aggression.
Let us not forget that at the most basic layer, we have a propensity for violence,
and evil itself “is the refusal to see one’s self in others.”20 In the most elemental
sense, nature is violence, eros is violence, birth is violence, death is violence.
Systemic violence is so subtle, stealthy, and seemingly so harmless that it escapes
any attention. It is the failure to take notice of this genre of generic violence
that has made scholars like Steven Pinker affirm that ‘violence has declined over
long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in
our species’ existence’ (Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011). And then, absence
or decline of violence is not the existence of ‘peace’ on the planet, let alone in
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the human mind, which really is the vortex of all wars. What goes on in wars
is the very worst evil and yet we accept it, even view it as the way. In the words
of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll, “All human beings... are commingled out of good and
evil”. They are, as Tolstoy said, interchangeable, and have no status in isolation;
they are always relative to each other. But Tolstoy also said that evil cannot be
vanquished by evil (The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1893). Our biology does
not make us innately good or evil. It is our tendency to overuse and misuse
the natural survival needs of the physical body that is harmful. Thus, eating
becomes gluttony, procreation becomes promiscuity, passion becomes toxic, and
compassion curdles into concupiscence, and so on. Everything is possible for
everybody. Criminals have at times done good, risking getting caught or risking
their lives, while great, even holy, men have mistreated many, taking immoral
advantage of the helpless and hopeless, the gullible and the weak. Nobody is
perfect, nor is anyone all vile. Even very flawed people can do a lot of good, and
even a moral mahatma can be incredibly mean. The vast majority of us have
the potential to act in either direction; the trouble is that we ourselves do not
know which of the two we will do when, and why. The principal reason why
we have failed to get a grip on our behavior is our belief that it all depends on
external forces, ranging from the culture and context in which we are born, to
the details of a particular circumstance. What we, as humans, might do when
we are desperate in traumatic situations has long baffled us. The truth is that it is
much more; it is deeper; it is not circumstance but consciousness that is the key. As
Andrew Kimbrell says, our consciousness has become both ‘dysfunctional’ and
‘destructive’, and that we need to change ‘the habits of perception and thinking’.
As Owen Barfield21 aptly reminds us, it is not only what we perceive, but also
what we fail to perceive, that determines the quality of the world we live in.
Whether we do good or bad in our daily life depends on what happens in the fight
between good and evil in the war within. We must also recognize that extreme
physical violence is not always the virulent evil; a murder can be manslaughter
while our mouth, not our hand, is our most violent weapon. The reach of evil is
across-the-board and its knife-like penetration goes right down to the soul. Evil
is hydra-headed. Extreme poverty is evil, bigotry is evil, viewing might as right
is evil, inequity is evil, injustice is evil, intolerance is evil, indifference to evil is
evil, cruelty to animals is evil, and hurting and humiliating is evil. Above all, like
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much else about human behavior, it is the way we treat others that determines
whether any action of ours is evil or immoral.
The new dimension, or cold evil, is systemic and embedded in conditions
where individuals and their sweeping range of emotions play at best marginal
roles, but in which we are all complicit implicitly. The paradox is that most of
us consider ourselves to be, and may even actually be, good persons. But, at the
same time, the institutional infrastructure of everyday life, which we are not even
aware of, underpins and sustains evil. The fact is that each one of us participates
in evil every single day, when we make a choice about how we want to live in the
world. We must recognize that the actions we take in deciding which products
to buy or which services to use or render, will also have an equal bearing. We
must also alter our relationship with work; work is at the ‘hinge of our holiness’,
where we increasingly ignore ethical principles and implications. If ‘cold evil’ is
to be contained that must change; for, so much of life is work-related and worksanctified.
To truly prosper, we must know that the ways in which we occupy
our waking hours are not based on the mere pursuit of pleasure or money or
any other material goal. What is happening is that even if we try our very best
to desist from doing any evil, our actions and activities, what we do to ‘make a
living’, to make it big, to have a ‘good life’ and to be upwardly mobile, could
all implicitly backstop evil. No human institution, national or international, is
untouched by ‘cold evil’, the nation-state, corporation, even the family. The first
two in fact have become the primary fountainheads of such evil. They no longer
have to be discreet or devious, or even pay lip-service to fairness and fair play.
As Sylvia Federici said about ‘corporate capital’, “the monsters now can move
without the mask”.22 The reality is that what is good for the nation-state is not
good for the globe, and what is paramount for the shareholders of a company
may not always be beneficial to society. But we have to come to implicitly accept
that they are exempt and above the moral laws that govern us as individuals.
Somehow, we have come to believe that an ‘office’ is loftier than the ‘officeholder’
and an institution is immune to individual ethics. And that has, in effect,
become acquiescence to evil. A major challenge we face now is to find ways to
harmonize national interest with global imperatives and corporate profit-making
with the public good.
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The basic point is that wherever power comes into play, the potential for
cold evil exists. Quite apart from Lord Acton’s lesser-noted axiom that ‘great men
are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority’,
as JRR Tolkien says, ‘evil occurs when individuals fall to the temptation of
wielding power for personal gain’. And institutions have marginalized the
individual, and ‘imaginary people are put before the real people who made them
up’. And when we boast about man’s power over nature, it is actually, as CS Lewis
reminds us, “a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its
instrument” (The Abolition of Man, 1947). In effect, we are violating both nature
and man. We must clearly realize that confronting this kind of insidious evil is not
possible unless we proactively alter many things that we have taken for granted as
trappings of our technological civilization, and make our daily decision-making
more moral than now. More than ever, morality is not a matter of calculated
choice; some of the most lacklustre choices we make have a deep moral meaning.
What moral philosophers call virtue ethics—the moral position that the objective
of our actions is to become virtuous by acting in a way that a virtuous person
would act—is now ingrained in our much-maligned ‘meaningless lives’. It is
true that in the end, everything is situational, and there is no ‘one-size-fits-all
principle’. What is happening in today’s world is that in our obsession with
the extraordinary, we are often tempted to sacrifice wholeness; in the pursuit
of super-specialization, we are forgetting that the whole is more than the sum
of the parts; and in the name of seeking super-intelligence, we are corrupting
intelligence itself. The only way to make sure that we do not morally err is to
deliberately bring to bear in our everyday life, qualities like what Buddhists call
loving-kindness, empathy, compassion, and sharing. That has long been our aim.
It goes back at least to the days of 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith, who
placed ‘sympathy’ (something closer to what we would now call ‘empathy’) at
the epicenter of ethical life. A century later, George Eliot wrote, “If art does not
enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally”. The good news is that recent
research by organizations like the Greater Good Science Center (USA) shows that
such qualities can be acquired, cultivated, and optimized, like any other desired
skills, through systematic practice and training. Helen Riess, in her book The
Empathy Effect (2018) says, that ‘while empathy is a built-in biological response
to suffering, we still need to work at it’. That means we don’t have to simply
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trust our good sense and Godspeed, good instincts and good luck, to do the
right thing. Like anything else, we can hone our ‘positive’ mental skills through
application and practice and training. If these findings are further corroborated,
it will mean that we can get a grip on our